"The planet is no longer nature, it is now the content of an art work." McLuhan, 1968.
Today would have been the one hundredth birthday of Canadian social theorist and media prophet Marshall McLuhan. Coiner of the term 'global village' and more often than not, reduced to his many pithy slogan descriptors about media culture, he was much more, much much more. His views are held up by supporters and detractors of media culture with about equal zeal--he was a canny interpreter of the times and a model of the contemporary need for interdisciplinary thinking--intersections were what McLuhan explored and it is what makes him a compelling and important figure in current thinking about media and particularly digital culture today. He died way before the dawn of the current digital era, but his idea about text and technology, text as technology and the way we shape and are shaped by our technologies is still a necessary ingredient in contemporary thinking about the subject.
His 'would have been birthday' is a good day to bring up Douglas Coupland's book about him, Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of my Work! and to refer to this site where there are any number of interesting things to explore about the man and his thinking.
p.s. while referring to Douglas Coupland--have you seen the Penguin book project called Speaking to the Past? In celebration of Penguin's 75th anniversary, he invited people to create Penguin book covers of their own and he made a set himself, they can be viewed here. Coupland does some really interesting graphic work alongside his writing.
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